Fazale Rana of Hugh Ross' Reasons to Believe organization, wrote a fine brief article on the problems of transitional forms in the fossil record. Rana says that it is common for evolutionary biologists to "point to 'feathered' dinosaur fossils, interpreted as transitional intermediates between birds and theropod dinosaurs (like the raptors in the movie, Jurassic Park.") He goes on to say:
The bird-dinosaur theory for the origin of birds has become "orthodoxy" among evolutionary biologists. Based on morphological (anatomical, physical) similarities between birds and theropods, a majority of evolutionary biologists conclude that birds evolved from these bipedal dinosaurs. In this scenario transitional forms between theropods and birds should be uncovered in the fossil record. A few years ago, the discovery of certain theropods (dated at about 125 million years in age) in the Yixian Formation of China's Liaoning province seemed to satisfy this key prediction. These fossils possess structures that have been interpreted as feathers by some paleontologists, making them candidates for transitional intermediates between dinosaurs and birds.
However, new work by an international team of paleontologists challenges this standard evolutionary assertion.4 Detailed analysis of a new fossil specimen of Psittacosaurus, a dinosaur thought to have no place in bird ancestry, indicates that the features interpreted as theropod feathers are actually frayed integument (skin). Researchers also amassed additional evidence that severs the evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs. For example, they demonstrated that the foot-and-toe structures of birds and theropods are fundamentally different even though superficially they appear to be similar. The team also showed that all the "feathered" dinosaur transitional forms occur in the fossil record 30 million years after the appearance of the first true birds. Plus, some of the "feathered" dinosaurs, such as Caudipteryx, are not dinosaurs at all-rather, they're flightless birds.
According to Alan Feduccia, the paleontologist who led the research team that investigated Psittacosaurus, constant promotion of the bird-dinosaur theory in National Geographic, Nature, and Science creates a false sense of confidence about how birds originated.5 In the midst of this publicity, the study conducted by Feduccia's team raises serious questions about the validity of the most widely held evolutionary explanation for bird origins. Feduccia says that "[t]he theory that birds are the equivalent of living dinosaurs and that dinosaurs were feathered is so full of holes that creationists have jumped all over it, using the evolutionary nonsense of 'dinosaurian science' as evidence against the theory of evolution."6
Check the article to check out the footnotes.